Richard Jeffrey Newman

The cat woke me up around 3 AM and I have not been able to get back to sleep, not even after lay­ing in bed for an hour and a half with my eyes closed. There’s a breeze in my room, but the heat still makes it kind of uncom­fort­able and my mind, frankly, is just too busy, wan­der­ing back and forth between a stu­dent who emailed me not just to com­plain about her grade, but actu­ally to black­mail me into giv­ing her the grade she wants, and some other work-related ten­sions from which I have not yet been able to free myself. Since the stu­dent is threat­en­ing to grieve the grade if I don’t do what she wants, I don’t want to say more than I have already said, and I’m not going to write about the other stuff since it gets a lit­tle per­sonal and it doesn’t really belong on my very pub­lic blog.

Any­way, since I couldn’t sleep, I decided to get up and read a bit, and I picked up a book I have been mak­ing my way through very slowly this year: Salmon: A Jour­ney in Poetry, 1981 – 2007, which was given to me by the edi­tor, Jessie Lenden­nie, the founder and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Salmon Poetry. I doubt she will remem­ber the con­ver­sa­tion we had at the AWP con­fer­ence in 2007 about run­ning a read­ing series – which I was doing at the time as Nas­sau Com­mu­nity College’s Cre­ative Writ­ing Coör­di­na­tor – but I was always grate­ful that, as I was about to leave her table at the book fair, she just handed me a copy of this anthol­ogy, with­out ask­ing for pay­ment. It’s taken me six years to finally pick it up and it’s a won­der­ful col­lec­tion, made up of sev­eral poems each from all the poets Salmon Poetry had pub­lished to that point.

This morn­ing, I hap­pened to turn, very appro­pri­ately, to the poem “Why Do You Stay Up So Late?” by Mar­vin Bell and these lines struck me:

If I die here they will say I died writ­ing.
Never mind the long day that now shrinks back­ward.
I crum­ple the light and toss it into the waste­bas­ket.
I pull down the moon and place it in a drawer.
A bit­ter wind of new win­ter drags the dew east­ward.
I dig in my heels.

And on that note, I am going to try to get a lit­tle of sleep before I really have to be out and about for the day.